What is architecture? Not of cities or buildings, but the organisational version: enterprise architecture, solution architecture, application architecture, software architecture, business architecture, infrastructure architecture? My neck hairs generally rise a little when we architects turn to this particularly vexing and…
Architecture principles are a very popular tool in the enterprise architect's tool box. The underlying concept of 'comply or explain', however, makes them particularly toxic. [This article originally appeared on InfoWorld in 2015. It has been reproduced here to have…
Moving IT support for your business to the cloud means 'our' IT being hosted in a fragmented landscape of data centers. That only looks like a silver bullet if you are short sighted. [This article originally appeared on InfoWorld in…
New Terms of Service I received communication from WhatsApp. I need to agree with the updated Terms of Service and Privacy Statement. I use WhatsApp to communicate with the colleagues in my department (e.g. we use it in our fire…
Nobody can deny that artificial intelligence (or machine learning, deep learning, or cognitive computing) is booming these days. And — as before, as this is in fact the second round for AI — the hype is almost unlimited. But there…
Agile and DevOps are on the rise. Hardly anyone these days defends up-front design approaches or project-based over product-based change. It seems to many that 'agile' is seen as a free pass for unlimited change. This is an illusion. Working…
Recently, I visited a few conferences and I noticed a somewhat hidden theme. While a lot of attention was being paid to moving to a (hybrid) cloud-based architecture and what you need for that (such as cloud management platforms), a…
In the world of real enterprises, enterprise architecture is a weak discipline. It doesn't play a role of any real substance in most medium-large enterprises, which are exactly the enterprises that can profit most from its goals: the management of…
These days, there is a lot of talk about the ‘API Economy’: a world filled with systems providing services to other systems using (above all RESTful) services. It would be easy to miss the fact that this isn’t new at…
I'm working on a few more serious things, but in the meantime I did not want to let this happen silently. The animation Why Enterprise Architecture ("Meet Michael") is now (clearly, 2000 views more than the next one) the most…
